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Gay Marriage Is Good for America

By order of its state Supreme Court, California began legally
marrying same-sex couples this week. The first to be wed in San
Francisco were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, pioneering gay-rights
activists who have been a couple for more than 50 years.

More ceremonies will follow, at least until November, when gay
marriage will go before California's voters. They should choose to keep
it. To understand why, imagine your life without marriage. Meaning, not
merely your life if you didn't happen to get married. What I am asking
you to imagine is life without even the possibility of marriage.

Re-enter
your childhood, but imagine your first crush, first kiss, first date
and first sexual encounter, all bereft of any hope of marriage as a
destination for your feelings. Re-enter your first serious relationship,
but think about it knowing that marrying the person is out of the
question.

Imagine that in the law's eyes you and your soul mate
will never be more than acquaintances. And now add even more
strangeness. Imagine coming of age into a whole community, a whole
culture, without marriage and the bonds of mutuality and kinship that go
with it.

What is this weird world like? It has more sex and
less commitment than a world with marriage. It is a world of fragile
families living on the shadowy outskirts of the law; a world marked by
heightened fear of loneliness or abandonment in crisis or old age; a
world in some respects not even civilized, because marriage is the
foundation of civilization.

This was the world I grew up in. The AIDS quilt is its monument.

Few
heterosexuals can imagine living in such an upside-down world, where
love separates you from marriage instead of connecting you with it. Many
don't bother to try. Instead, they say same-sex couples can get the
equivalent of a marriage by going to a lawyer and drawing up paperwork –
as if heterosexual couples would settle for anything of the sort.

Even
a moment's reflection shows the fatuousness of "Let them eat
contracts." No private transaction excuses you from testifying in court
against your partner, or entitles you to Social Security survivor
benefits, or authorizes joint tax filing, or secures U.S. residency for
your partner if he or she is a foreigner. I could go on and on.

Marriage,
remember, is not just a contract between two people. It is a contract
that two people make, as a couple, with their community – which is why
there is always a witness. Two people can't go into a room by themselves
and come out legally married. The partners agree to take care of each
other so the community doesn't have to. In exchange, the community deems
them a family, binding them to each other and to society with a host of
legal and social ties.

This is a fantastically fruitful
bargain. Marriage makes you, on average, healthier, happier and
wealthier. If you are a couple raising kids, marrying is likely to make
them healthier, happier and wealthier, too. Marriage is our first and
best line of defense against financial, medical and emotional meltdown.
It provides domesticity and a safe harbor for sex. It stabilizes
communities by formalizing responsibilities and creating kin networks.
And its absence can be calamitous, whether in inner cities or gay
ghettos.

In 2008, denying gay Americans the opportunity to marry
is not only inhumane, it is unsustainable. History has turned a corner:
Gay couples – including gay parents – live openly and for the most part
comfortably in mainstream life. This will not change, ever.

Because
parents want happy children, communities want responsible neighbors,
employers want productive workers, and governments want smaller welfare
caseloads, society has a powerful interest in recognizing and supporting
same-sex couples. It will either fold them into marriage or create
alternatives to marriage, such as publicly recognized and subsidized
cohabitation. Conservatives often say same-sex marriage should be
prohibited because it does not exemplify the ideal form of family. They
should consider how much less ideal an example gay couples will set by
building families and raising children out of wedlock.

Nowadays,
even opponents of same-sex marriage generally concede it would be good
for gay people. What they worry about are the possible secondary effects
it could have as it ramifies through law and society. What if gay
marriage becomes a vehicle for polygamists who want to marry multiple
partners, egalitarians who want to radically rewrite family law, or
secularists who want to suppress religious objections to homosexuality?

Space
doesn't permit me to treat those and other objections in detail, beyond
noting that same-sex marriage no more leads logically to polygamy than
giving women one vote leads to giving men two; that gay marriage
requires only few and modest changes to existing family law; and that
the Constitution provides robust protections for religious freedom.

I'll
also note, in passing, that these arguments conscript homosexuals into
marriagelessness in order to stop heterosexuals from making bad
decisions, a deal to which we gay folks say, "Thanks, but no thanks." We
wonder how many heterosexuals would give up their own marriage, or for
that matter their own divorce, to discourage other people from making
poor policy choices. Any volunteers?

Honest advocacy requires
acknowledging that same-sex marriage is a significant social change and,
as such, is not risk-free. I believe the risks are modest, manageable,
and likely to be outweighed by the benefits. Still, it's wise to guard
against unintended consequences by trying gay marriage in one or two
states and seeing what happens, which is exactly what the country is
doing.

By the same token, however, honest opposition requires
acknowledging that there are risks and unforeseen consequences on both
sides of the equation. Some of the unforeseen consequences of allowing
same-sex marriage will be good, not bad. And barring gay marriage is
risky in its own right.

America needs more marriages, not fewer,
and the best way to encourage marriage is to encourage marriage, which
is what society does by bringing gay couples inside the tent. A good way
to discourage marriage, on the other hand, is to tarnish it as
discriminatory in the minds of millions of young Americans.
Conservatives who object to redefining marriage risk redefining it
themselves, as a civil-rights violation.

There are two ways to
see the legal marriage of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. One is as the
start of something radical: an experiment that jeopardizes millennia of
accumulated social patrimony. The other is as the end of something
radical: an experiment in which gay people were told that they could
have all the sex and love they could find, but they could not even think
about marriage. If I take the second view, it is on conservative – in
fact, traditional – grounds that gay souls and straight society are
healthiest when sex, love and marriage all walk in step.

Holy crap, you're scary. Right, that reminds me why I don't hang out with angry, Judeo-Christian value hating, self aggrandizing, liberal media zombies. You can have your change and when you're standing in the picket line in your new Euro-American tax bled, overfed government led country you can think about real change. Oh, and how to spell shoe!

Quoting AdrianneHill:

I would suggest that most of the women who only get their information from conservative sites to look around the world a bit. Go outside of the comfort zone and research to see if what you have been told as true is really the truth.

Listening to conservative talk radio gives one a very skewed view of the world in general and the united states in general. Hell, if one listened to only talk radio, it would have seemed that Romney was a shoo in to the presidency and would carry as many states as Reagan, but that was not true. The world is changing, as it always does, and now the pendulum is swinging away from using government as an enforcer of religious ideals, at least in countries that aren't theocracies. If people are so devoted to the thought of government being informed and ruled by a book of old religious ideals, there are many theocracies piddling around these days. They range from vaguely religious to absolutely psychotic devotion to a bloodthirsty god. I'm sure you will find a place that suits your distrust of humanity and technology and will also be happy to keep you in the place that god intended for you to forever be. Enjoy your stay

Sure, but in all fairness, i must warn you my husband is always looking for an excuse to bring as many other women into it as possible. He has roaming hands; feel free to pop him in the mouth. But I would welcome conversation with people who read actual books instead of the back of a DVD case.

Maybe we could move to Charleston or savannah, preferably Charleston...savannah is only two hundred years old.

Quoting Momniscient:

I might love you.

Wanna get married?

Quoting AdrianneHill:

I would suggest that most of the women who only get their information from conservative sites to look around the world a bit. Go outside of the comfort zone and research to see if what you have been told as true is really the truth.

Listening to conservative talk radio gives one a very skewed view of the world in general and the united states in general. Hell, if one listened to only talk radio, it would have seemed that Romney was a shoo in to the presidency and would carry as many states as Reagan, but that was not true. The world is changing, as it always does, and now the pendulum is swinging away from using government as an enforcer of religious ideals, at least in countries that aren't theocracies. If people are so devoted to the thought of government being informed and ruled by a book of old religious ideals, there are many theocracies piddling around these days. They range from vaguely religious to absolutely psychotic devotion to a bloodthirsty god. I'm sure you will find a place that suits your distrust of humanity and technology and will also be happy to keep you in the place that god intended for you to forever be. Enjoy your stay

Holy crap, you're scary. Right, that reminds me why I don't hang out with angry, Judeo-Christian value hating, self aggrandizing, liberal media zombies. You can have your change and when you're standing in the picket line in your new Euro-American tax bled, overfed government led country you can think about real change. Oh, and how to spell shoe!

Quoting AdrianneHill:

I would suggest that most of the women who only get their information from conservative sites to look around the world a bit. Go outside of the comfort zone and research to see if what you have been told as true is really the truth.

Listening to conservative talk radio gives one a very skewed view of the world in general and the united states in general. Hell, if one listened to only talk radio, it would have seemed that Romney was a shoo in to the presidency and would carry as many states as Reagan, but that was not true. The world is changing, as it always does, and now the pendulum is swinging away from using government as an enforcer of religious ideals, at least in countries that aren't theocracies. If people are so devoted to the thought of government being informed and ruled by a book of old religious ideals, there are many theocracies piddling around these days. They range from vaguely religious to absolutely psychotic devotion to a bloodthirsty god. I'm sure you will find a place that suits your distrust of humanity and technology and will also be happy to keep you in the place that god intended for you to forever be. Enjoy your stay

Sure, but I'm all fairness, i must warn you my husband is always looking for an excuse to bring as many other women into it as possible. He has roaming hands; feel free to pop him in the mouth. But I would welcome conversation with people who read actual books instead of the back of a DVD case.
Maybe we could move to Charleston or savannah, preferably Charleston...savannah is only two hundred years old.

Quoting Momniscient:

I might love you.

Wanna get married?

Quoting AdrianneHill:

I would suggest that most of the women who only get their information from conservative sites to look around the world a bit. Go outside of the comfort zone and research to see if what you have been told as true is really the truth.

Listening to conservative talk radio gives one a very skewed view of the world in general and the united states in general. Hell, if one listened to only talk radio, it would have seemed that Romney was a shoo in to the presidency and would carry as many states as Reagan, but that was not true. The world is changing, as it always does, and now the pendulum is swinging away from using government as an enforcer of religious ideals, at least in countries that aren't theocracies. If people are so devoted to the thought of government being informed and ruled by a book of old religious ideals, there are many theocracies piddling around these days. They range from vaguely religious to absolutely psychotic devotion to a bloodthirsty god. I'm sure you will find a place that suits your distrust of humanity and technology and will also be happy to keep you in the place that god intended for you to forever be. Enjoy your stay

I think that LOVE is always better then hate. And ALL Americans should have the SAME rights and privileges. For the person that said heterosexuals would not settle for "the
equivalent of a marriage by going to a lawyer and drawing up paperwork" I would gladly give up my marriage license if it meant that we would all be treated equally.

I think had the government really wanted to make things right they would get out of the business of marriage and instead issue Partnerships Licenses to all who want to have a legal commitment and allow Churches to preform marriages.

This would have made an end run around all the bigotry. But this issue has been great for both parties who only care about THEIR power not the country.It's funny I heard the same arguments when it came to allowing people of different religions and races to marry. I guess bigotry is alive and well in America and we should be ashamed of it. Someday I hope to see an America in which each person is allowed to live their life as they wish as long as they do NOT infringe on the rights of others.

And a really good solution is to allow everyone to have a marriage license. Then no one would have to give up theirs.

Quoting DisabledVet:

I think that LOVE is always better then hate. And ALL Americans should have the SAME rights and privileges. For the person that said heterosexuals would not settle for "the
equivalent of a marriage by going to a lawyer and drawing up paperwork" I would gladly give up my marriage license if it meant that we would all be treated equally.

I think had the government really wanted to make things right they would get out of the business of marriage and instead issue Partnerships Licenses to all who want to have a legal commitment and allow Churches to preform marriages.

This would have made an end run around all the bigotry. But this issue has been great for both parties who only care about THEIR power not the country.It's funny I heard the same arguments when it came to allowing people of different religions and races to marry. I guess bigotry is alive and well in America and we should be ashamed of it. Someday I hope to see an America in which each person is allowed to live their life as they wish as long as they do NOT infringe on the rights of others.

Holy crap, you're scary. Right, that reminds me why I don't hang out with angry, Judeo-Christian value hating, self aggrandizing, liberal media zombies. You can have your change and when you're standing in the picket line in your new Euro-American tax bled, overfed government led country you can think about real change. Oh, and how to spell shoe!

Quoting AdrianneHill:

I would suggest that most of the women who only get their information from conservative sites to look around the world a bit. Go outside of the comfort zone and research to see if what you have been told as true is really the truth.

Listening to conservative talk radio gives one a very skewed view of the world in general and the united states in general. Hell, if one listened to only talk radio, it would have seemed that Romney was a shoo in to the presidency and would carry as many states as Reagan, but that was not true. The world is changing, as it always does, and now the pendulum is swinging away from using government as an enforcer of religious ideals, at least in countries that aren't theocracies. If people are so devoted to the thought of government being informed and ruled by a book of old religious ideals, there are many theocracies piddling around these days. They range from vaguely religious to absolutely psychotic devotion to a bloodthirsty god. I'm sure you will find a place that suits your distrust of humanity and technology and will also be happy to keep you in the place that god intended for you to forever be. Enjoy your stay

Oh, the irony...ha, ha, ha! Good one. Quick, too. I see you everywhere on this site. Busy lady. I think you all should definitely hook up. You both think so much of yourselves and so little of others. Where is the tolerance? Forgot, only goes one way. Oh well, nothing to do but laugh!!!

Quoting Momniscient:

Oh...

The irony...

Quoting Mom0485:

Holy crap, you're scary. Right, that reminds me why I don't hang out with angry, Judeo-Christian value hating, self aggrandizing, liberal media zombies. You can have your change and when you're standing in the picket line in your new Euro-American tax bled, overfed government led country you can think about real change. Oh, and how to spell shoe!

Quoting AdrianneHill:

I would suggest that most of the women who only get their information from conservative sites to look around the world a bit. Go outside of the comfort zone and research to see if what you have been told as true is really the truth.

Listening to conservative talk radio gives one a very skewed view of the world in general and the united states in general. Hell, if one listened to only talk radio, it would have seemed that Romney was a shoo in to the presidency and would carry as many states as Reagan, but that was not true. The world is changing, as it always does, and now the pendulum is swinging away from using government as an enforcer of religious ideals, at least in countries that aren't theocracies. If people are so devoted to the thought of government being informed and ruled by a book of old religious ideals, there are many theocracies piddling around these days. They range from vaguely religious to absolutely psychotic devotion to a bloodthirsty god. I'm sure you will find a place that suits your distrust of humanity and technology and will also be happy to keep you in the place that god intended for you to forever be. Enjoy your stay

I don't have to tolerate bigotry. I know the argument but it's specious and fallacious.

You can laugh. I expect that from people who express opinions like yours. It is often a lot of lol's and not a lot of substance.

We should hook up. Of that you are correct. She is intelligent and thoughtful. My kind of lady.

Quoting Mom0485:

Oh, the irony...ha, ha, ha! Good one. Quick, too. I see you everywhere on this site. Busy lady. I think you all should definitely hook up. You both think so much of yourselves and so little of others. Where is the tolerance? Forgot, only goes one way. Oh well, nothing to do but laugh!!!

Quoting Momniscient:

Oh...

The irony...

Quoting Mom0485:

Holy crap, you're scary. Right, that reminds me why I don't hang out with angry, Judeo-Christian value hating, self aggrandizing, liberal media zombies. You can have your change and when you're standing in the picket line in your new Euro-American tax bled, overfed government led country you can think about real change. Oh, and how to spell shoe!

Quoting AdrianneHill:

I would suggest that most of the women who only get their information from conservative sites to look around the world a bit. Go outside of the comfort zone and research to see if what you have been told as true is really the truth.

Listening to conservative talk radio gives one a very skewed view of the world in general and the united states in general. Hell, if one listened to only talk radio, it would have seemed that Romney was a shoo in to the presidency and would carry as many states as Reagan, but that was not true. The world is changing, as it always does, and now the pendulum is swinging away from using government as an enforcer of religious ideals, at least in countries that aren't theocracies. If people are so devoted to the thought of government being informed and ruled by a book of old religious ideals, there are many theocracies piddling around these days. They range from vaguely religious to absolutely psychotic devotion to a bloodthirsty god. I'm sure you will find a place that suits your distrust of humanity and technology and will also be happy to keep you in the place that god intended for you to forever be. Enjoy your stay

I don't have to tolerate bigotry. I know the argument but it's specious and fallacious.

You can laugh. I expect that from people who express opinions like yours. It is often a lot of lol's and not a lot of substance.

We should hook up. Of that you are correct. She is intelligent and thoughtful. My kind of lady.

Quoting Mom0485:

Oh, the irony...ha, ha, ha! Good one. Quick, too. I see you everywhere on this site. Busy lady. I think you all should definitely hook up. You both think so much of yourselves and so little of others. Where is the tolerance? Forgot, only goes one way. Oh well, nothing to do but laugh!!!

Quoting Momniscient:

Oh...

The irony...

Quoting Mom0485:

Holy crap, you're scary. Right, that reminds me why I don't hang out with angry, Judeo-Christian value hating, self aggrandizing, liberal media zombies. You can have your change and when you're standing in the picket line in your new Euro-American tax bled, overfed government led country you can think about real change. Oh, and how to spell shoe!

Quoting AdrianneHill:

I would suggest that most of the women who only get their information from conservative sites to look around the world a bit. Go outside of the comfort zone and research to see if what you have been told as true is really the truth.

Listening to conservative talk radio gives one a very skewed view of the world in general and the united states in general. Hell, if one listened to only talk radio, it would have seemed that Romney was a shoo in to the presidency and would carry as many states as Reagan, but that was not true. The world is changing, as it always does, and now the pendulum is swinging away from using government as an enforcer of religious ideals, at least in countries that aren't theocracies. If people are so devoted to the thought of government being informed and ruled by a book of old religious ideals, there are many theocracies piddling around these days. They range from vaguely religious to absolutely psychotic devotion to a bloodthirsty god. I'm sure you will find a place that suits your distrust of humanity and technology and will also be happy to keep you in the place that god intended for you to forever be. Enjoy your stay

Send me email updates about messages I've received on the site and the latest news from The CafeMom Team.
By signing up, you certify that you are female and accept the Terms of Service and have read the
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